[project1dev] Re: Animation LODing
- From: Alan Wolfe <alan.wolfe@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: project1dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 21:59:16 -0700
Oh and we can do this in our game too if we need to as a preformance
optomization later on (:
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 9:41 PM, Alan Wolfe <alan.wolfe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Ok so for those of you that don't know what LOD is, it stands for "Level of
> detail" and in essence means that when things are farther away, or less
> noticeable in some way, that you use less detail cause nobody notices, and
> that saves you processing power and memory.
>
> For example, objects that are farther away (models, mountains, etc) use
> less polygons when they are far away since you can't tell the difference at
> a great distance anyways.
>
> It makes everything way nicer.
>
>
> Anyhow...So animating models is expensive (takes a lot of CPU power).
>
> Today i learned something really bad ass, an animation LODing technique.
>
>
> So what the deal is, is you declare up front how many of a specific type of
> animation are allowed to run at once.
>
> So like... if you have 10 people all walking around using the same
> animation, normally you'd have to pay the cost of processing that same
> animation 10 times.
>
>
> The LOD technique is to say "only allow 3 maximum instances of that
> animation to happen at once".
>
> So what that does is only process 3 animations but have multiple people use
> the same processed animation data.
>
> If you set it to only 1 maximum instance, everyone would animate and walk
> in unison which is really crappy, and if you do too high a number maximum
> instances, too many people are animating and it eats up a lot of CPU.
>
> So you basically find the balance and say "well its hard to tell that they
> are sharing animations if you do 3 max" and then you have your magic number,
> and the game runs faster.
>
> It's kind of cool... just wanted to share it with everyone...
>
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